My Life as a Courgette

Oh to have been a com­put­er ani­mat­ed fly-on-the-wall when the Hawai­ian-shirt­ed yo-yos down at the Pixar ranch caught sight of Claude Bar­ras’ minia­ture stop-motion won­der, My Life as a Cour­gette. A fam­i­ly film. Ani­mat­ed. Con­tains an acci­den­tal mur­der with­in its open­ing three min­utes. You can vir­tu­al­ly hear the cock­tail wee­nies falling out of their gap­ing mouths.

This is a sto­ry that makes no bones about lung­ing direct­ly for the jugu­lar when it comes to broach­ing issues of tremen­dous social impor­tance. There’s no elab­o­rate metaphors or pro­tec­tive world build­ing. This is ani­ma­tion that dares to engage with uncom­fort­able real­i­ty, plain and sim­ple. It is, among oth­er things, a gor­geous hymn to the social care sys­tem and the work under­tak­en by peo­ple who have ded­i­cat­ed their lives to car­ing for the vul­ner­a­ble and unfortunate.

Yet there is no direct polit­i­cal com­men­tary about dec­i­mat­ing ser­vices or lack of resources. The film offers a unique and ener­gis­ing take on life as expe­ri­enced through the guile­less eyes of a dis­placed child. It takes a long hard look at the con­cept of inno­cence, a state of mind that both pro­tects and fer­ments the rit­u­al hor­rors of existence.

That ker-azy title should be explained. Cour­gette is the nick­name of wide-eyed pip­squeak Icare who is spir­it­ed away to a rur­al orphan­age when an every­day acci­dent caus­es the death of his alco­holic moth­er – a sequence han­dled square-on, but with an abun­dance of sen­si­tiv­i­ty and poise. It’s a change of scenery for Cour­gette and it has the poten­tial to be great fun. He is placed among a diverse rab­ble of rau­cous pre-teens whose rea­sons for des­ti­tu­tion cov­er a broad range of ills.

The film clev­er­ly devel­ops inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships and flesh­es out char­ac­ter arcs. If one of the kids is a bul­ly or extreme­ly shy, the film takes time to tease out the (often shock­ing) rea­sons why. Our hero takes a shine to super­cool Camille, who receives vis­its from an evil aunt attempt­ing to secure cus­tody of her. There is no issue, no taboo, no con­ces­sion to grim real­i­ty that the film shies away from, and yet its forth­right nature nev­er comes across as gra­tu­itous line-cross­ing or emp­ty provo­ca­tion. In fact, this is a film whose every immac­u­late­ly ren­dered frame and minute­ly con­sid­ered line of dia­logue pos­i­tive­ly tin­gles with the promise of hope.

The film is an unas­sum­ing tech­ni­cal tour de force thanks to the work of debut direc­tor Bar­ras. Yet it also dis­plays the dis­tinc­tive paw-prints of its screen­writer, Céline Sci­amma. Her abid­ing inter­est in grow­ing pains among dis­en­fran­chised, des­per­ate youths con­tin­ues, although it has found a per­fect new con­duit in the form of day-glow, bob­ble-head­ed stop-motion fig­urines. Indeed, the visu­al style of the film and the colour­ful design of the char­ac­ters resem­bles dis­card­ed ​’90s toys – there’s ample detail to make them expres­sive, but with enough worn edges to sug­gest that they were once loved, way back when.

It has been a gigan­tic hit in its native France and deserves to do big busi­ness all over the globe. Take kids to see this world­ly, out­spo­ken film, and expect it to become their new favourite. And, very prob­a­bly, yours too.